What Is The Tone In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

An abundance of Emily Dickinson’s poems including “Because I could not stop for Death,” “Pain has an element of blank,” and “Afraid? Of whom am I afraid?” convey one’s acceptance and capitulation to anguish over a long period of time which reflects on citizens’ acceptance to the numerous deaths of family during the zeitgeist of the Civil War. Dickinson’s idiosyncratic style of using a bitter and ingenuous tone in her poems display the hardships of one to give up to anguish and all of its uncomfortable experiences. Dickinson’s incorporation of various anaphoras hammers home the concepts of pain and dread in her poems so that one goes along with them and can experience their fondness in a pleasurable and benign manner, rather than letting them

Contrastingly, in “Afraid? Of whom am I afraid?” she depicts ironic fear of how one should not be afraid of anything because more of life awaits.

Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death,” conveys one’s acceptance of his/ her mortality by creating wistful images through the head, of the journey one takes while dying. The poem starts out by ironically personalizing Death as a friendly and more welcoming commodity rather than Death being a vicious and violent entity that takes away the liveliness of people. The lines, “The Carriage held but just Ourselves-” and “And Immortality.” portray how Death becomes a friendly article that stops for one and rides with them on a royal Carriage to immortality. The carriage embodies a comfortable ride to Death from life that creates a sense of pleasure. Later on in the third stanza, Dickinson’s anaphoric “We passed the,” creates a reflective tone of a speaker who experiences the melancholy of literally leaving their

The anaphoric “it” constantly appearing in the poem hammers home the idea that pain will always dominate one’s life until there comes a point where one has no other identity than pain. “It” possesses a plosive sound which delineates the harsh impact that pain leaves on one’s life. Although there exists a temporality to pain, the speaker here states that “When it began, or if there were A day when it was not” which can be presented with the idea that once one becomes experienced with pain, there will be no mercy after. The bitter tone of the indicated poem impacts the way one reads it so they can become fearful of pain, but overtime they will start to accept it and not wish to ameliorate the